Shepherd satellite

astronomy

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Alternative Title:
shepherding

Portion of Uranus's ring system with the bright Epsilon ring flanked by its two shepherd moons, Cordelia and Ophelia, in an image obtained by Voyager 2 on Jan. 21, 1986, three days before the spacecraft's closest approach to the Uranian system. Many of Uranus's other rings can be discerned inward of the Epsilon ring.Jet Propulsion Laboratory/National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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Saturn

…moon, Prometheus, have been dubbed shepherd moons because of their influence on ring particles. During Voyager 1’s flyby, the two bodies were discovered orbiting on either side of the narrow F ring, which itself had been found only a year earlier by Pioneer 11. The moons’ gravitational interactions with the…

Uranus

…spreading in a process called shepherding. Certain orbits that lie inside or outside the orbit of a given ring are at the proper radius for a moon in such an orbit to establish a stable dynamic resonance with the ring particles. The condition for the resonance is that the orbital…